Writing
Writing is one of the most important aspects of human lives. It was thought about nearly 5000 years ago to keep a record system in which could be used to keep record of all statistics and happenings, hence the term record system. A good example would be the Sumerian city of Lagash. It employed 1200 people, 300 of which were slaves. The temple employed 205 cloth workers in addition to sailors, millers, bakers, cooks, guards, fisherman, herders, and scribes. Such a complex operation could not be stored by one man so a more developed record system took place. The first form of record keeping would be used by objects. Say for example that a farmer has 10 small coin-like objects to represent the 10 cows he currently has. As cities and economies expanded more and more different types of coins were being produced along with the new materials and resources. Long distance trade was also emerging as temples would send merchants with caravans full of goods. The merchant had tokens that represented the type and amount of goods being traded. But, sometimes the caravan driver would take some of the goods and those goods's tokens for himself easily without the first merchant knowing and selling the rest to the second merchant. So, merchants started putting the tokens into sealed balls of clay or an envelope, so then if the container was tampered with, the second merchant would know. However, this would make it hard for the caravan driver to know how many goods he was travelling with. As a result, Merchants made impressions of the tokens on the outside of the envelope while the clay was still wet. Before long someone realized that there was no need for the tokens as long as you had the impressions. Therefore, the tokens were removed, the envelope was flattened into one tablet, and writing was born. Writing was first used to keep records, but over time its use expanded and needed to be interpreted in a different way. There are four different stages of writing. -Pictographs (c. 3500-3000 BCE) This stage has a symbol that means what it looks like. For example a picture of a sun could mean hot, or simply, the sun. -Ideographs (c. 3000-2100 BCE) These can also be more abstract than their literal meaning. For example, a "sun" picture could mean "day" or "light" or "happiness." -Rebus Writing (c. 2100-1000 BCE) This was a critical turning point. Up till now, one related to what the symbols looked like to tell the meaning. With rebus writing, one used the phonetic sounds of words created by symbols to create new words. For example, a word like "Neilson" would be very difficult to write with pictographs unless everyone knew what Neilson looked like as distinguished from other people. However, with rebus writing, one could use the sounds suggested by a picture of a man kneeling plus a sun to build the word "Neilson". Rebus writing, by making the reader relate to the ears, not the eyes, made it possible to write just about anything. It was a complex system, however, since it required hundreds of symbols, one for each syllable used in a language. Both Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics used about 700 symbols. -Phonetic alphabet (c. 1000 BCE to the present) This system is based on the fact that we can only make about twenty-five or so different sounds, while we can combine those individual sounds into hundreds of symbols, each requiring a different rebus. The alphabet simplifies the process vastly by using just one symbol for each individual sound we make (e.g.--B, D, K, etc.). Although we generally give credit for the alphabet to the Phoenicians (thus the term "phonetics"), it seems the Egyptians also had an alphabet of sorts that the Phoenicians drew upon. The Greeks completed the process by adding vowels, which the Egyptian and Phoenician systems lacked. Next Article Previous Article Back to History Outline